Grown Men Don't Cry
by Bonsoir
Summary: FE7. One-shot collection. Each chapter will be about a different man from FE7 and something that made them cry. Chapter Two: Heath watches Vaida go back to Bern.
1. Dorcas

**Title:** Grown Men Don't Cry  
**Chapter Title:** Beautiful Simplicity  
**Characters:** Dorcas, Natalie  
**Genre:** Romance  
**Words:** 728  
**Notes:** This is a one-shot collection. Each chapter will be about a different man from FE7 and something that made them cry. I know. I'm a sap. While these will be loosely connected you should be able to skip ahead to other chapters as they're posted with no trouble. This chapter assumes that Dorcas and Farina supported.

* * *

_Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle._

—Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

* * *

Dorcas was a simple man. He was plain but hard working; his body was muscular and calloused from the farm-fields in his childhood and battlefields as an adult. He wore simple clothes and thought simple thoughts and was happy with simple things.

He rented a simple house and had agreed to farm a simple bit of land for a small turn of the profits.

His wife was simple and their love was simple and everything in his life had always been just that one thing: simple.

Natalie was not strong. She never would be, the healers and doctors and even his friends said. Some wondered at his decision to marry her anyway, but for Dorcas the answer had been, well, _simple_.

He loved her. And he loved their simple wedding where there was dancing and music and ale and laughter. He danced one dance with Natalie and it was the best dance of his life—slow and gentle and sweet, just like she was.

She was easy to love and he was easy to please.

The house was simple, like he remembered it, with the roof looking just so and the front door painted but the artwork he'd done on it fading.

He loved to draw; it was his only real passion, aside from his wife. Natalie had always been the subject of his drawings, though sometimes he painted trees or flowers—like on the front door—but when he wanted to study a face, he studied hers. When he was afraid that he couldn't remember her anymore, he drew her. Over and over, again and again.

He pulled the worn drawing of her from his shirt pocket and unrolled it as he opened the front door.

He heard her gasp of surprise and threw the drawing into the fire; he didn't need it anymore. He could study her as extensively as he wanted for the rest of his life. Simple. Easy to please. She was so easy to love.

He wanted to say a hundred things to her at once but all he did was wrap his arms around her and hold her close and reacquaint himself with how she smelled and felt because he'd almost forgotten.

She cried but he didn't. He loved her too much to cry at seeing her, of all things, at finally seeing her after almost two years. Letters weren't the same, and he'd only had a few. She'd tried to draw a picture of herself on one of them, looking happy and holding a meat pie, which she knew he loved.

It was terribly done, but he loved it.

Because he loved her.

Logic so simple couldn't be wrong.

When they'd talked and held one another and loved-loved-loved the night away, or at least the afternoon, he remembered something important.

"Natalie," he said, over dinner, and when she looked up, he continued: "I want to tell you about someone."

"Is it another woman?" she teased. Her eyes were dancing and her lips pulled back in an amused smile. She was always so easy to read, easy to love.

"Yes," he said, but laughed.

No suspicion from his wife. He would never be with another; he had no need to, no want, no desire. He only loved one—would only _ever_ love one. It was simple, like him.

"Tell me about her, then."

Instead of saying anything, he went to his bag and rifled through it before pulling out a pouch of money and dumping it on the table in front of her. A few coins fell on the floor.

"I don't know where she is or what she's doing," he said, "but she gave me this. For you. I won't have to leave to find work anymore."

And then _she_ was laughing and _he _was crying and saying stupid things like, "We're going to get your leg fixed," and "I love you," and "I really missed you."

And all she said in response was, "Dorcas," just his name, whispered softly as she held him and he held her. He knew that if he wasn't such a simple man, she would never have known to say exactly what it was he needed to hear—just that.

Just his name.

Because that told him that she loved him, that she had missed him, and that everything was finally going to be all right.


	2. Heath

**Title:** Grown Men Don't Cry  
**Chapter Title:** Loyalty  
**Characters: **Heath, Vaida  
**Genre:** Friendship  
**Words:** 1,153  
**Notes:** Assumes that Kent and Heath supported. Not many people utilize their A-support, it seems. I know that most people think of noble/knight relationships when loyalty is mentioned but loyalty can really be had for anyone, and Vaida has already proved her loyalty to Heath before you meet them in-game.

* * *

She'd laugh at him if she knew that his eyes stung, and then he would have to fake amusement of his own, one hell of a bark of a laugh, too, for it to be convincing, and he'd say something like, "The wind, Commander Vaida! It's blown dust in my face."

It would be a lie, of course, though the wind was whipping against them so strongly it would be easy to believe. Maybe some slight young girl on a pegasus would be affected by the buffeting tempest outside of the port city of Badon, but a wyvern rider from Bern was used to not only the cold, but the wind, too.

So Commander Vaida would know it was a lie, and she'd spare no mercy in telling him off for lying to her, though she knew and understood lying better than anyone.

"People just lie," she'd told him years ago. Hell, the woman had practically raised him, really, if Vaida's training could be considered something like not-_really_ parenting.

She'd been beautiful, then, with her hair a little longer and a spark in her eye that he knew was loyalty and dedication and other things that made up Vaida in her entirety.

"But why?" he'd asked her. At the time he had been fourteen or fifteen, old enough to recognize a lie as soon as it fled someone's mouth, but not old enough to understand anything behind the actual lies themselves. Reasoning was lost to him.

"You'll see," was her response. Vaida had always been the type to make other people think. She hated giving out the answers to obvious questions. "Think for your own goddamn self," she'd said more than once, not only to him, but to others under her command. "It's not that difficult."

They landed outside the city, and he smiled when Commander Vaida stayed in the saddle rigging. Of course she wouldn't get down, he thought. Of course she wouldn't want a hug, or a kiss, or even a handshake.

"You won't change your mind?" he asked.

She gave him a hard stare. "What do you think."

"I think you will be brave but foolish no matter what I say."

She grinned—the wicked grin of someone who couldn't change, of someone simultaneously lost and found; it was the smile-grimace of no turning back, a decision solidly wrought.

He squirmed, uncertain.

"I'll see you again." Her voice had a rough edge to it.

"Why do you lie?" It was rude but so was Vaida, and now he wanted to know.

"Why does anyone lie?" she countered—a question for a question, but she didn't deny that the untruth.

So he did not deign to answer it except in his own mind, but the idea that Vaida would lie to make him feel better was as odd as the idea of her having tea with General Wallace of Caelin while they discussed crop rotation.

Instead, he shook his head. "You'll die," he told her. "You'll be killed."

"Everyone dies eventually. It will be worth showing my loyalty for the one person to whom it belongs."

"Prince Zephiel," he murmured.

She inclined her head as Hyperion snorted beneath him; he was restless from the long ride on the _Davros_.

"There will be no arguing with you, I suppose," he said, dryly, but the corners of his mouth turned up, just the smallest bit.

"That's right."

He wondered why his eyes still stung.

"You'll go back to face certain death just to prove your loyalty—just to prove you're no coward, no deserter."

"Among other things," she admitted, reluctantly.

"Are you sure you won't stay away from Bern?" he asked.

"We're wanted fugitives, Heath," she said. Not _pup_ or _kid_—just his name, like that. It meant she was being honest, being serious, feeling something like contemplative. He found that worrisome. "They'll find us both sooner or later, should we be foolish enough to run."

"All the more reason for you to stay away," he cautioned.

"Don't be ridiculous. I have never run—not from spear or wyvern or man." She gave him a cocky smirk. "Do what you will, kid, but stay away from Bern."

And then she was gone, Umbriel's powerful wings beating against the air, a leathery-sounding _whump-whump_ as they churned the sky. Goodbyes were not something Vaida messed with—unnecessary. Either you saw someone again or you didn't. What was the point of saying goodbye?

"So what now, Vaida?" he wondered. "Are you going to go back and die—and for what? For unappreciated loyalty?"

Bern had lied to Heath—had branded him a traitor, and had tried to kill him. He could not feel loyalty for them any longer.

He could understand Vaida's devotion to Prince Zephiel—he was young, and still naïve, not yet under the crushing influence of his father, but Heath didn't see anything good happening, there. Queen Hellene was almost as bad an influence on her son as King Desmond, and Vaida…

She would never be allowed to live.

So what was the point of her going back to Bern, when she could flee to Ilia where no one would even _want_ to search for her, when Caelin could surely use her expertise?

Maybe she had to try, he thought, but King Desmond would never allow her the chance to influence his son; he would have her killed on sight—for he could not be so stupid as to be ignorant of the fact that Dame Vaida's loyalty belonged to the prince and not the king.

As her outline grew dim and disappeared on the horizon, it suddenly hit him: Vaida's reason for returning to Bern.

It seemed completely out of character for her, but he knew he was not mistaken. If Vaida was captured, and found alone, then they would assume him dead. She might even lie, one last time, and say he was lost on the Dread Isle, or at the hands of the Black Fang, or to a long fall.

His first instinct was to stop her. It was madness, to rush into the arms of death.

But there was no such thing as reasoning with Commander Vaida. She always did exactly what she wanted to, and nothing more or less. That was how she'd earned his respect, and, he thought, his love.

It was a sin to let a sacrifice be in vain, he thought, least of all one made by his beloved commander. Sir Kent had offered him solid work in Caelin—serving Lady Lyndis, whom he believed to be worthy of his own loyalty and trust. Nobody would think that the Bernese traitor Heath was hiding out in Caelin, that he had found honourable work serving a new lord and lady. He would be safe there.

With a curse, he wiped the back of his hand over his face. "Blasted wind," he muttered, turning back toward Badon.


End file.
